The Gin and Tonic

The summer blockbuster of mixed drinks.

The restaurant’s main dining room was, like my lunch partner’s expense account, majestically commodious, and the light softly filling its temperate air seemed as buttery as the kitchen’s Dover sole. Earlier this month in midtown Manhattan, my film agent and I conducted a most productive business lunch at Oceana, where the severely assuaging atmosphere enhanced a discussion of the second draft of my first screenplay, a feature-film tribute to the gin and tonic. We glowed with the knowledge that we were full of fortune. And liquor.

And while you guys are out having fun, I hope to be posted up at Oceana and working through its 132 gin and tonics. Getting G&T: The Movie into development and preproduction will require the careful plying of dozens of investors, because our goal is to produce the film independently, and my ambitions for the project are titanically deranged. After dessert, the agent and I glided from the dining room to the white-marble bar to review the script page by page, and she supposed that following through on all of my ideas would yield a seven-hour film costing $600 million to produce, not including marketing costs, or tips. “But we must do justice to the summer blockbuster of mixed drinks!” I cried, and we gently lay our foreheads on the bartop to cool the fever of the ongoing brainstorm.

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At the center of the film is an account of the drink’s origins in the 1800s, among the officers of the British East India Company, who caught buzzes in the course of fighting mosquito-borne illness. “The British dominance of its empire in India was due in part to juniper in its form as gin,” a Cambridge botanist writes. “Gin and tonic was a staple, containing quinine from the South American shrub Cinchona, which warded off malaria. It therefore took administrators ten years to die instead of five.”

My postcolonial take on the birth of the drink builds to a Bollywood-style musical number scored to Oasis’ “Supersonic” as arranged for sitar. Then, with the segue of the Jicks’ “Pink India,” that set piece morphs kaleidoscopically into another, an homage to the G&T’s special place in American culture. The second number is in the style of a co-ed Busby Berkeley fantasia, but with the boys costumed in Nantucket Reds and the girls in high-heeled boat shoes and all of them dancing the shag to an original song by Vampire Weekend (feat. the Yale Whippenpoofs). The G&T, like the madras and seersucker fabrics upon which it is so often spilled, is a subcontinental invention appropriated for the warm-weather pleasure of Americans WASPs of all races and creeds. As the authors of the definitive guide to preppy drinking put it, “When mixed well, and sipped on the back of a Sag Harbor beach house at 7:32 pm on a Friday, there’s really nothing better.”

These conjoined musical sequences have been the center of the film since I began the imagining of it. The mood I’m aiming for should reflect the composition of a well-made G&T, with one measure of intoxicating sharpness balancing every two measures of sparkling pop. In an attempt to squeeze into the script a lime-like dramatic tartness, I wrote a small part for James Spader as a boarding-school chemistry teacher who collaborates with a former student to make bathtub gin. And then I started compulsively adding ideas and context and now, well, the beginning of the thing is all INT. BEDROOM, VICEREGAL PALACE (PERU)—NIGHT:

In her bedchamber, Ana de Osario—also known as the Countess of Cinchon and more to the point the wife of the Viceroy of Peru, which is to say the big enchilada in all of Spanish South America in the 1630s—tosses sweat-glazed in tangled sheets. Her writhing is nearly erotic [I like Penélope Cruz for the part] until an Exorcist-quality spasm of Python-quantity projectile vomiting breaks the reverie. Malarial fever has seized the vicereine.

In the gloom of the room, servants tread lightly amid heavy furniture, and the viceroy paces fretfully. From the ill woman’s POV these motions darkly melt into vague hallucinations evocative of the oblong blobs of slide views of Plasmodium.

A Jesuit priest enters. Our first thought is that he will deliver last rites—but then he mutters some untranslated sentences to the husband. These are greeted with the brightened eyes of cautious optimism—and then the lady’s hallucinations deepen, resolving into a vision of natives in the Andean night, stripping a bush of its bark. An Incan healer treats the bark, and the bark heals the countess, who in 1639 returns to Europe bearing the Countess’s Powder, the febrifuge known to you and me as quinine …

I confessed to the agent that I was fixated on the story of Ledger and Mamani, with its ambiguous dynamics of loyalty and exploitation, and I confessed, further, that I was having trouble thinking of actors ideally cast in the parts. She said, “Benedict Cumberbatch and Gael García Bernal. Boom.”

And then she fretted aloud that this whole quinine thread was getting too foreign for a mainstream U.S. audience. So I suggested we add some early scenes in an American grain: On the Oregon Trail, as in the Civil War, we mixed quinine powder with native spirits. But Jefferson Davis’ attempts to promote a compound of quinine and whiskey were a lost cause. The flavors simply don’t fuse, even when the drink is shaken with the help of a hard-trotting horse.

By contrast, gin and tonic very literally have good chemistry. “You know the Somerset Maugham line about not shaking martinis?” I asked. “He said they should always be stirred ‘so that the molecules lie sensuously on top of one another’? A G&T is as delicious as it is because something like that is actually happening.” The G&T is greater than the sum of its parts because the parts are of a piece. The essential oils in juniper are structurally similar to the basic compound of quinine. Because they rhyme, they fuse and fit and “aggregate” and build a beautiful new flavor. The most important part of the drink’s name is its and. The agent very brightly proposed that we hire animators to put together a chemical-bonding cartoon featuring the dancerly union of the relevant molecular orbital diagrams, possibly hosted by a top-hatted ampersand.

(I won’t pretend to understand all the subtleties of the British class system, largely because that system does not strike me as subtle in the least, but a sense of booze-based social striving—of wanting to impress—gives the U.K. G&T a slightly different tone: A certain kind of suburban stockbroker lives in London’s “gin-and-tonic belt,” and the Pet Shop Boys do not approve of the “gin and Jag” psychodemographic.)

It was after last call at Oceana, and the conversation was still, like its theme, scintillating.

“What’s the takeaway?” the agent asked. The takeaway is this recipe, which intends to stoke the audience’s anticipation for the inevitable sequel to G&T, a tribute to tonic water’s citric cousin, bitter lemon. I started with the concept of splitting the difference between a G&T and a Tom Collins, and my barman, Brendan Susens-Jackson, ended up reinventing the apricot:

Shake the first six ingredients well with ice. Strain over ice into a highball glass. Top with the bitter lemon. Garnish and serve. Drink and helplessly pucker your lips into an embouchure proper for rocking a transverse flute.